From Judgment to Hope

A Study on the Prophets

Walter Brueggemann

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781611649703
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

While conservative interpreters might believe that prophets were predictors and progressives believe the prophets to be simply social advocates, Walter Brueggemann argues that the prophets were "emancipated imaginers of alternative." Emancipated from the dominant thinking of their societies, the prophets imagined an alternative reality and invited listeners to join them in their commitment to that new reality.

In this collection of studies, popular biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann explores the Major Prophets, the Minor Prophets, and the prophets of the Persian Age. By highlighting the common themes of judgment and hope found in the prophets' messages, Brueggemann invites readers to consider what those messages mean for us today. Questions for reflection conclude each chapter. From Judgment to Hope is suitable for individual or group study.

Chapter 1

THREE MAJOR PROPHETS

Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel

We commonly refer to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel as “Major Prophets” because they are, in the Old Testament, big books. In fact, these three are “major” not only because of size but also for other reasons. These three books are a major act of prophetic imagination that constitutes a major assault on established political-economic Israel and an opening to a major new possibility for Israel. Beyond that, these prophetic books constitute a major resource for Christian thinking and acting in a culture that is manifestly out of sync with the purposes of God in the world. In order to consider the dimensions of “major” in these prophetic books, we will consider what is distinctive for each of these books and what is constant in all of them.

The distinctiveness of each of these three prophetic books and the three prophetic personalities around which the books cluster is grounded in the particular traditions that each person and book is rooted in. Each tradition is very old in ancient Israel. And each tradition yields a quite different discernment and articulation of faith.

ISAIAH

The person of Isaiah and consequently the book of Isaiah are rooted in the religious tradition of the city of Jerusalem, its Davidic monarchy, and its Solomonic temple. This theology, with a distinct urban bias, portrayed the city of Jerusalem as the epicenter of all worldly reality to which God was totally and unconditionally committed. Isaiah had access to the line of Davidic kings, and Isaiah’s rootedness in Jerusalem is why Isaiah claims that his “call” to prophetic ministry occurred in the Jerusalem temple. As a child of Jerusalem who thinks in terms of temple and king (as Jeremiah and Ezekiel do not), Isaiah imagines the future to be shaped by king and temple, a focus that has made him amenable to Christian interpretations of Jesus as the coming king.

The book, covering a long stretch of time, features the failure of the city, its king and priests, the demise of the city at the hands of the Babylonians, and the anticipated recovery of the city. Below are verses that reflect each of these aspects of Isaiah.

The prophet describes the jeopardy and failure of the city:

And daughter Zion¹ is left

like a booth in a vineyard,

like a shelter in a cucumber field,

like a besieged city.

1:8

The prophet anticipates the deportation of the royal family from the city:

Days are coming when all that is in your house, and that which your ancestors have stored up until this day, shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the LORD.

39:6

The prophet announces a gospel of comfort to the destroyed city:

Comfort, O comfort my people,

says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and cry to her

that she has served her term,

that her penalty is paid,

that she has received from the Lord’s hand

double for all her sins.

40:1; cf. 52:7

Isaiah anticipates the restoration of the city:

But be glad and rejoice forever

in what I am creating;

for I about to create Jerusalem as a joy,

and its people as a delight.

I will rejoice in Jerusalem,

and delight in my people; . . .

65:18–19

The prophet assures that the city will again become prosperous:

Your gates shall always be open;

day and night they shall not be shut,

so that nations shall bring you their wealth,

with their kings led in procession.

60:11

Isaiah does not doubt that God’s commitment to Jerusalem will succeed as the international destination for all nations in their quest for well-being:

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,

and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

They shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war anymore.

2:3–4

Isaiah is such an important book in the Jewish and Christian traditions that we will spend two chapters discussing it in more detail.

JEREMIAH

The person of Jeremiah and consequently the book of Jeremiah are rooted in the old covenant of Sinai that is reflected in the traditions of Deuteronomy. Jeremiah himself is said to be from among “the priests who were in Anathoth” (1:1). That locates him in the northern tribal territory of Benjamin, apart from the southern tribal area of Judah that is the home of the Davidic tradition. His home town of Anathoth, moreover, is the home of Abiathar, the priest banished by King Solomon (1 Kgs. 2:26–27). This linkage suggests that Jeremiah is a product of a religious, pious northern tradition that was in principle opposed to the dynastic power of David in the south. Jeremiah could imagine a societal order in which dynasty and temple were nonessential and quite dispensable.

Where king and temple were the ordering institutions for Isaiah, the ordering institution of Jeremiah was the Torah of Sinai, that is, the Ten Commandments and the extensive imaginative interpretation of them in the four books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The focus of Torah in Deuteronomy is especially on social justice for the vulnerable—the widow, the orphan, the immigrant—those without social protection in a patriarchal society.

The Jeremiah tradition insists that the Jerusalem establishment has in wholesale ways violated Torah requirements. Breaking the covenant leads to covenantal sanctions (curses) that would bring the destruction of Jerusalem:

Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but everyone walked in the stubbornness of an evil will. So I brought upon them all the words of this covenant, which I commanded them to do, but they did not.

11:8

Breaking covenant with YHWH (or Yahweh, or God; see glossary) results in a failed society. But from the same tradition Jeremiah can imagine a covenantal renewal initiated by God:

The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. . . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. . . . for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

31:31–34

The new covenant—the renewed covenant of Sinai—is one in which Israel will be glad to assent to the Torah commandments that make for a viable covenant community. The book of Jeremiah moves from reprimand for violations of covenant, to the prospect of a renewed covenant that is based on divine forgiveness.

EZEKIEL

The person of Ezekiel and consequently the book of Ezekiel reflect a tradition of a priestly, sacramental reading of historical reality. Ezekiel is a priest who assesses the failure of Jerusalem and anticipates the future of Jerusalem beyond its demise through the lens of sacramental practice. Ezekiel is appreciative of aesthetics, of order and symmetry, and is guided especially by practices of holiness that feature ritual purity; it is such purity and cleanness that make it possible for the God of Israel to dwell in the midst of Israel in the Jerusalem temple.

On this basis Ezekiel delivers a savage analysis of the failure of Jerusalem. An imagined tour of the temple is a review of compromise and accommodation that violate the purity of God in radical ways and are termed “abomination”:

He said to me, “Go in, and see the vile abominations that they are committing here.” So I went in and looked; there, portrayed on the wall all around, were all kinds of creeping things, and loathsome animals, and all the idols of the house of Israel. . . . He also said to me, “You will see still greater abominations that they are committing.”

8:9–13

It is likely that Ezekiel’s catalog of offenses derives from the priestly tradition of the book of Leviticus in which orbit Ezekiel is situated. That tradition affirmed that the practice of holiness was an essential condition of being able to host the presence of God. In both Leviticus and Ezekiel, however, it must not be assumed that condemnation pertains only to liturgical matters, for the tradition also takes serious note of ethical, neighborly affront (see Ezek. 16:49 and 18:14–18).

The repulsive practices that Ezekiel found in the temple will cause God to depart the temple. God dramatically departs from the temple, driven into exile by the failure of temple practice and of the priests who supervise it:

Then the glory of the LORD rose up from the cherub to the threshold of the house; the house was filled with the cloud, and the court was full of the brightness of the glory of the LORD. The sound of the wings of the cherubim was heard as far as the outer court, like the voice of God Almighty when he speaks. . . . The cherubim rose up. These were the living creatures that I saw by the river Chebar.

10:4–15

God’s glory, the almost material palpable presence of God in the temple, is forced into exile. For that reason, God’s absence is also palpably discernible. And when the divine presence departs the holy city, the city is destined to failure and destruction.

Upon the destruction of the city, the Ezekiel tradition reverses field and begins to anticipate the restoration of the city. This anticipation takes the form of a new shepherd (Davidic prince) ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Also by Walter Brueggemann
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to the Prophets by Patricia K. Tull
• 1.   Three Major Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel
• 2.   First Isaiah (Chapters 1–39)
• 3.   Second and Third Isaiah (Chapters 40–55, 56–65)
• 4.   The Twelve Minor Prophets
• 5.   Three Important Minor Prophets: Hosea, Amos, and Micah
• 6.   Three Prophets from the Persian Period: Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi
• A Brief Summary of the Prophetic Books of the Bible
• An Approximate Time Line of the Prophets
• Well-Known Quotations from Isaiah
• Glossary of Terms
• Excerpt from Interrupting Silence: God’s Command to Speak Out, by Walter Brueggemann